The
expression ‘critical thinking’ has become a popular one, so much so that
people who couldn’t agree on most of the important things in life are likely
to claim both that they’re thinking critically and their adversaries are not.
Because different people might mean quite different things by ‘critical
thinking’, it is probably a good idea to spend a little time going over some
of these different meanings.

In his book The
God Delusion Richard Dawkins mentions the motto on the website of Bryan
College, a Christian Bible College named after William Jennings Bryan: think
Critically and Biblically. I wonder what the folks at Bryan would
think of a secular college that advised students to think Critically
and Naturalistically.

We can get a
good sense of what the folks at Bryan mean by ‘critical thinking’ by looking
at how they describe their Center for Critical Thought:

Bryan College is
committed to helping students develop a biblical worldview, and as part of a
Christ centered education, offers several programs toward this end. Central
to the center’s work and mission is the development of exciting academic
seminars in which Christian scholars who compete at the highest levels of
scholarly inquiry address topics which are at the center of critical national
issues. Topics include natural law, the federal judiciary system, education,
taxation, science, athletics, the fine arts, and a wide range of other
critical cultural concerns.

Through the presentation
of four seminars annually, the Center enables our academic departments on a
regular multiyear basis to discuss in depth a relevant cultural issue of
significance stemming from their own disciplines.

It seems that what the folks at
Bryan mean by ‘critical thinking’ is thinking about issues that are of
critical concern to them in their mission to promote a biblical worldview and
thinking about them in ways that are in accord with how they understand that
worldview.

They’re not the only ones who understand ‘critical thinking’ in this way. For
example, this is also what the school board in Cobb Country, Georgia, meant
when it said that it was trying to encourage critical thinking by
requiring a warning sticker to be placed on all biology texts. What they
wanted to encourage was doubting a view they
considered contrary to their understanding of the Bible. In their view, if
you can encourage students to doubt a whole area of science that conflicts
with a biblical worldview, you are encouraging critical thinking.

This view of
critical thinking is not the one that has dominated the thinking of the
majority of people who teach critical thinking, who study it and write
theoretical papers about it, who produce textbooks on the subject, and the
like. The consensus of that group is that critical thinking requires open-mindedness.
You’re not encouraging an attitude of open-mindedness by telling students
that what they are about to study should not be taken as fact even though the
consensus of the scientific community is that it is fact. You’re not
encouraging open-mindedness when you advise students to think critically and
biblically.

Furthermore,
critical thinking requires a fair-minded consideration of alternative
viewpoints, but the Cobb county school board was discouraging rather
than encouraging fair-minded inquiry. It was mainly interested in raising
doubts about evolution, which it presumably thought would enhance its own
creationist beliefs. The board was not encouraging the legitimate
investigation and study of various alternative evolutionary mechanisms. It
was not interested in advancing inquiry but in advancing its own religious
beliefs. It was specifically endorsing a false dichotomy: that any criticism
of evolution implies the “only” alternative, creationism.

Using critical thinking skills to support your beliefs and to undermine
opposing viewpoints is certainly legitimate, but it is a mistake to identify
critical thinking with these two activities. The catalogue description for
the Liberal Arts Program at Bryan college specifies that thinking critically
will enable the students to “relate ideas historically and logically and
compare and contrast competing views.” That sounds promising, since the
disposition to be open-minded enough to take seriously viewpoints that
contrast with one’s own is essential to being a critical thinker. But I
wonder how seriously the teachers and the students at Bryan College take the
viewpoints of people like Darwin, Dennett, or Dawkins. Bryan college is
located in Dayton, Tennessee, where, in 1925 William Jennings Bryan
successfully defended a Tennessee state law that made it illegal to teach in
a state school “any theory that denies the story of the Divine Creation of
man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man has descended from
a lower order of animals.” Would the professors of biology at Bryan College
encourage their students to consider that their biblical worldview might be
wrong and that the theory of natural selection might be correct? This is an
important question because critical thinking is much more than a set of
logical skills that one uses to defend one’s beliefs and refute the
opposition. In fact, critical thinking is antithetical to using logical and
argumentative skill to promote a particular worldview that itself is considered
immune from scrutiny.

One of the
key elements of critical thinking is the recognition that one’s worldview can
be a major hindrance to being fair-minded. A minimum requirement of
fair-mindedness is a willingness to take seriously viewpoints opposed to your
own. In other words, you have to be willing to admit that you might be wrong.
To exempt one’s own worldview from critical evaluation is common enough, but
if we want to teach our students to think critically we must teach them to
try to understand how one’s worldview is likely to be embedded with
prejudices, biases, and false notions. We have to remind our students that
everything we experience or remember is filtered through that set of beliefs
and values that make up one’s worldview. To think critically is to be willing
to examine conflicting positions in a fair-minded way and to accept that even
beliefs you’ve held all your life might be wrong. If you can’t do that, you
might still be able to develop some critical skills like comparing and contrasting
ideas or comparing ideals with practices, and you would be a critical thinker
but only in the sense of being able to apply one or more of the standards of
critical thinking in a skilful way. In some
quarters, this is called the ‘weak sense’ of critical thinking, where the
strong sense requires that the thinker have a certain disposition as
well as a recognition of the many affective, cognitive, and perceptual biases
that inhibit and distort our judgment.

The
following Strategies Sheet builds off the work of Richard Paul and others; it
tries to illustrate the difference between the weak and the strong senses of
critical thinking.

a
recognition that there are alternative explanations for
experiences and that selecting from among them requires consideration
of the consequences and implications of the alternative explanations
as well as an awareness of the assumptions they are built on

Applying
the hypothetico-deductive model and
argument to the best explanation

§

Many people,
perhaps most people, when they think of critical thinking are thinking of
standards and skills like those listed above. You will find plenty of
critical thinking textbooks, for example, that seem to identify critical
thinking with standards and skills. Now maybe that’s all we should
realistically hope for: teaching critical thinking in the weak sense of
teaching a few skills like how to recognize valid inferences, how to clarify
ideas, or how to evaluate causal claims. I consider it a small victory if my
students can leave my classes being able to read a newspaper article or
listen to a newscast without being misled by stories that suggest causal
connections where there probably aren’t any. For example, in one recent
class I passed out copies of a news article to the students. Here’s a summary
of the article:

When Ann Dey’s dog had a stroke in July, one side of his face
became paralyzed so severely he couldn’t blink. She knew she needed to do
something before the 13-year-old pug, Jimmy, lost his eye to infection.

“I
was open to anything that would help,” Dey said.

At Pets
Unlimited, a nonprofit animal hospital that was San Francisco’s first
all-holistic veterinary medical clinic, Jimmy received acupuncture for a
month. Now, his face is fine.

I asked the students to identify the
implied causal claim being made and to evaluate it. The article suggests that
the acupuncture eliminated the paralysis in the dog’s face. All Ann Dey knows for sure, though, is that after the dog was
treated with acupuncture, his face got better. So,
the reasoning here commits the post hoc fallacy. Some students recognized
this, but others didn’t. One, for example, commented that since acupuncture
works on humans, it probably works on dogs, too. So, the dog probably did get
better because of the acupuncture. This then led to a discussion on what it
means to say “acupuncture works on humans” and what evidence there is for
this claim. It also led to a discussion of whether it was reasonable to infer
that if a treatment like acupuncture were known to be effective in
treating human facial paralysis, would it be reasonable to infer by analogy
that the treatment would probably work for dogs?

All would agree that the ability to recognize fallacies is an essential
critical thinking skill. But if critical thinking were restricted to the
study of standards and skills, there would probably be little objection to
teaching critical thinking at the elementary school level. However, not far
from where I live in northern California, there is a group that calls itself
The Church of the Divide and they have been very vocal about not wanting
their children to be taught critical thinking. Why? Because they recognize
that it would encourage children to disagree with their parents. This group
may be overprotective of their children but they certainly understand what
critical thinking in the strong sense means. Some teachers also know what it
means to teach critical thinking in the strong sense and they won’t do it
because they don’t want their students questioning them about fundamental
matters. So, perhaps restricting ourselves to teaching only skills and
standards like those in the causal exercise discussed above is the most we
should hope for in most schools, at least at the elementary and junior high
school level. Some parents who have no religious axe to grind might also get
quite upset if their children’s teachers encourage them to be critical
thinkers in the strong sense. But high school and college students should at
least be made aware of what it means to think critically in the strong sense,
in the Socratic sense where the unexamined life is not worth living and where
reflection includes reflection on the processes of thinking, feeling, and
perceiving.

§

Teaching critical thinking in the
strong sense. It is
important to reflect on the effects of egocentrism and ethnocentrism
on our ability to think critically. Each of us evaluates what we perceive,
read, or hear through the filter of our worldview and most of us tend to
measure anything new by what we already believe and feel. We tend to think
that we understand our own experience better than anyone else ever could.
However, because of emotional biases, desires, wishful thinking, and lack of
knowledge we often deceive ourselves and interpret our experiences in a way
that is consistent with our worldview rather than open ourselves to other
possibilities that other, less interested and less biased people, might see.
A very profound personal experience—like a near-death experience or that of a
mysterious unseen presence, for example—might be very difficult to evaluate
objectively.

We also have
naïve faith in sense perception and memory, but unless we have
an understanding of how perception and memory work, we won’t be able to
understand why we can’t blindly trust either. This instruction should include
more than the usual epistemological lesson of demonstrating our proneness to
error and fallibility. Our students should understand the constructive
nature of sense perception and memory, that neither sense perception nor
memory work like video or audio recorders. We construct our perceptions and
memories out of bits of data that have been filtered, organized, and
completed by our brains. The process is heavily affected by our worldviews,
our interests, expectations, and purposes. We’re not truth-seeking machines
by nature, as psychologist Jim Alcock once put it.

To
illustrate a point and to generate some discussion about how the brain works
in filtering out potential sense data and constructing a coherent visual
image, I show my students a clip of Jerry Andrus and one of his creations.
The clip is available for download at http://skepdic.com/refuge/ctlessons/illusion.wmv

It beautifully illustrates how the
brain constructs perception. At first, the brain puts the data together to
see a fence around Jerry. When he “walks through” the fence, the brain has to
scramble and readjust its perception. I ask the students: What did you see?
What was actually there? How are the two related? What is there is not what
you see. What you see is a construction generated by the brain and projected
onto the external world. Now what does that tell you about any information
you derive from sense perception? You can’t assume that the world is as you
perceive it to be.

I also use a DVD called “Surprising Studies on Visual Awareness,” available
from Viscog Productions, Inc. (http://www.viscog.com/surprising_studies.html)
for a fee. The videos on this DVD illustrate such things as how we can fail
to see something that is right in front of us if we are concentrating
intently on something in our visual field. They’re fun and provide a great
way to get a discussion going about the nature of sense perception.

Another way
to illustrate the constructive nature of perception is by discussing
backmasking. What sounds like gibberish suddenly makes sense when somebody
tells you what to listen for. Also, a person with a strong emotional
motivation might hear what sounds like her deceased grandmother saying “I
love you” through the static of a cross-wired phone message. Why is that? Can
suggestions or desires really affect what we hear or what we see? They can and
they do. Whatever we do, our students should leave our classes understanding
that we can’t assume the world is as we perceive it to be. Thus, any
inferences we draw from sense perception must be evaluated very carefully and
with some skepticism. Likewise, any testimony from others based on sense
perception must also be treated with some skepticism. We should remind our
students that there is no scientific study linking eyewitness confidence with
accuracy of testimony. A critical thinker must know the limitations of
eyewitness testimony.

Memories are
also constructions and there are all kinds of things that can go wrong in
reconstructing the past. Cases of mistaken identity can be dramatic
illustrations of this point, especially if they involve things like a memory
expert being identified by a rape victim as her attacker even though he was
in another city doing a live television interview at the time of the rape.
(She had watched the interview on television shortly before she was attacked
and had confused the television face with the face of her attacker.) You
can’t just assume a memory is accurate, even if it seems clear and vivid and
comes with a feeling of subjective certainty.

In addition
to providing our students with some insights into the nature of perception,
we should also help them examine the role of worldviews in perception and
thinking. If we encourage our students to accept their worldviews as
yardsticks against which to measure every idea and value they come upon, we
are not teaching them to think critically. Most of us who aspire to critical
thinking in the strong sense see Socrates as a model. We’re especially fond
of quoting the famous line that “the unexamined life is not worth living.”
When we think of the examined life, we think of a life that does not exempt
anything from scrutiny. Anyone who teaches that critical thinking is learning
how to argue from a particular worldview, which itself is immune from
critical scrutiny, is by that very fact not qualified to teach critical
thinking. Of course, it’s true that even someone who unquestionably accepts
the inerrancy of the Bible or the Koran might be able to infer valid
inferences from premises, compare different interpretations of passages, and
argue intelligibly and intelligently why one interpretation is superior to
another, and perform a number of other tasks that are usually identified as
demonstrating critical thinking skills. Even so, critical thinking is not
just a set of skills you can turn on or off as you please, depending on what the
topic is.

I was first introduced to the notion of critical
thinking in the strong sense by Richard Paul, a philosopher at Sonoma State
University. Paul considers critical thinking a way of life, one that is
devoted to finding out the truth in a fair-minded and open way. Critical
thinking is a disposition to use our critical thinking skills all the time
for any subject, including religion. To Paul, critical thinking is a kind of
reflective thinking that includes subjecting one’s own worldview to the same
kind of scrutiny and critical analysis that many of us are willing and able
to do for the worldviews of those who don’t think like we do.In 1981, I think it was, Paul
and a few like-minded folks at Sonoma State University sponsored an
international conference on critical thinking. I attended that conference and
a few more at Sonoma State in the ensuing years, where I heard talks by or
about several important thinkers who have come to influence my own thinking
about critical thinking.One of those I heard was Robert Ennis, a philosopher of education at
the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, who defined critical thinking as “reasonable reflective thinking that
is concerned with what to do or believe.” This definition, like most
definitions of critical thinking, should be seen as scaffolding (to use
Paul’s expression) on which to build our theories and curricula, rather than
as the one and only specific goal we aim to achieve. I’ve moved
through several definitions of critical thinking over the years, but all of
them have stayed close to the core of Ennis’s notion of reflective thinking
that is concerned with beliefs and actions. I’ll return to this definition
below.

Another
speaker at one of the International Conferences on Critical Thinking who
influenced me profoundly was Neil Postman. Before I heard him speak, I’d read
his book Teaching as a Subversive Activity. He later wrote a book
called Teaching as a Conserving Activity. According to Postman, the
teacher’s job is not to reflect the status quo or the currently popular
worldview. The teacher’s job is to inspire students to think critically about
that worldview. As I understood Postman, he was not advising teachers
to challenge traditional algebra or geometry; nor was he advising teachers to
introduce their students to crackpot scientific theories as if they
constituted a serious challenge to consensus science. I don’t think he would
have approved what teacher Chris Helphinstine did
during his first week on the job at Sisters High School in Sisters, Oregon.
The new teacher was supposed to be teaching biology, but he passed out an
essay by young earth creationist Ken Ham, who runs the website Answers in
Genesis. Helphinstine also showed a PowerPoint
presentation that connected evolution to eugenics experiments practiced by
Nazi doctors during WWII. The new teacher said he was “hoping to encourage
critical thinking in his biology class” (The Oregonian, 3/21/2007.) He
was fired. I think Postman would have agreed that whatever else this teacher
was doing, he wasn’t encouraging critical thinking. He was trying to get his
students to reject a consensus view in science in favor of a particular
religious worldview. As I understood Postman, he was trying to get teachers
in the humanities and social sciences to provide their students with
alternatives to current dominating trends in those fields. He wasn’t advising
math and science teachers to provide junk science as an alternative to real
science. If Mr. Helphinstine wanted to go outside
the curriculum to teach critical thinking, he might have taught his students
about consilience. Theories that have strong supportive evidence from
several distinct fields are thereby strengthened. When facts from embryology, structural
anatomy, genetics, paleontology, psychology, and other fields converge to
support evolutionary biology, that latter discipline’s foundation is
mightily strengthened.

In any case,
as far as I was concerned, Postman was preaching to the choir I had already
joined, thanks to Howard Kahane’s book Logic and
Contemporary Rhetoric-The Use of Reason in Everyday Life. I was fortunate
to have read Kahane’s book in my first year of
full-time teaching. It’s now in its 10th edition (2006,
Wadsworth). Nobody called it a critical thinking text in 1971, when the book was
first published. (At that time, two other expressions were vying for primacy:
‘informal logic’ and ‘practical logic’.) The publisher now has a blurb for
the book that notes that it “puts critical thinking skills into a context
that students will retain and use throughout their lives.” A blurb about the
author notes that Kahane was one of the founders of
the “critical thinking” movement. Kahane, who had
already published a popular formal logic text, included no formal logic at
all in the new text. No Aristotle. No Venn diagrams. No truth tables. No
Sentential or Predicate Logic. No tedious exercises trying to symbolize
ordinary language arguments. Instead, there are chapters on advertising
and textbooks and the mass media and how they affect our
thinking. There is a great chapter on language that focuses on how language
can be used to mislead and deceive us. Traditional logic texts focus on uses
of language; Kahane focuses on abuses of
language. He has several chapters on fallacies in reasoning, the kinds
of fallacies it was not too difficult to find examples of in daily life, many
of them supplied by advertisers or by public figures, especially politicians.

Kahane was the first of the textbook
writers, as far as I know, to introduce the study of doublespeak into a logic
text. I find it interesting that a recent Briefing Paper from Timothy Lynch
of the Cato Institute applied the same kind of analysis to language that was
advocated by Kahane more than thirty years ago and
which I think should be included in every general course on critical
thinking. Language has become so mucked up that the President of the United
States can, with a straight face and with bipartisan support, claim to be
defending freedom and liberty while instituting secretive subpoenas,
secretive arrests, secretive detentions, and secretive trials. Our government
now tortures people but we call it debriefing and admit that sometimes
it’s inhumane. We admit we deprive people of sleep, make them go naked
for long periods, frighten them with vicious dogs, dunk them in water, and
who knows what else, but we just shake our heads and say those things aren’t
torture. Why not? Because we’re doing them
and we don’t torture. As former CIA director Porter Goss put it: “we
don’t torture, we do debriefings. Torture doesn’t get results. We get
results with our methods.” Therefore, by this logic, since we get results and
torture doesn’t, whatever we’re doing, it isn’t torture. It also isn’t very
good thinking and it is our job as teachers to encourage our students to see
such language for what it is: deceptive and manipulative. [See http://www.cato.org/pubs/bp/bp98.pdf.]

For most of
my teaching career I have been sympathetic to the view that critical thinking
instruction should be about more than just skills like recognizing
contradictions and evaluating arguments. I’ve tried to encourage my students
to develop a disposition to critically examine the presuppositions of
their own culture as expressed in textbooks, TV news, daily newspapers,
political speeches and policies, religions, and in the personal values and
beliefs they’ve accumulated over the years. Paul, Kahane,
Postman, and others of similar ilk inspired me to want to teach critical
thinking in the strong sense.

§

Generally,
teachers cannot count on the media or political leaders or family members of
students to reinforce the importance of learning how to think critically. So
when someone like Oprah Winfrey does a program that promotes critical
thinking, we should be grateful. I know she’s not the person most of us would
think of when trying to imagine a good role model for critical thinkers but
let’s give credit where credit’s due. Last October she did a program called
“Truth in America,” which featured N.Y. Times
writer Frank Rich defending his book The Greatest Story Ever Sold: The
Decline and Fall of Truth from 9/11 to Katrina. The book is very critical
of the American public and the mass media for not being skeptical enough
about the things we were being told by the Bush administration and the mass
media regarding alleged weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, about Saddam
Hussein’s alleged connection with al Qaeda, and about the government’s response
to the massive hurricane that destroyed a good part of New Orleans and many
other places as well. Oprah’s website featured an encouragement to “Start
recognizing the truth in government and media with
seven ways to start thinking critically.” Oprah didn’t claim to
have come up with the seven tips herself. She had Dr. Roy Peter Clark of the Poynter Institute, a school for journalists and
journalism students, provide the tips. Clark was
also in the front row during the program to answer questions like “how can we
get back to critical thinking?” Of course, such a question assumes we were
once there and have lost our way. I'm not so sure we’ve ever been there, but
in any case the tips from Dr. Clark are good tips. I realize that Oprah
Winfrey is the master of the good story and the anecdote that substitutes for
serious analysis. In less than an hour, she can turn a minor tale of
something like “road rage” into a candidate for admission into the Diagnostic
and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. She can help women win baseless
lawsuits just by parading a few sick ladies across the screen and note that
they all had breast implants. Of course, she is just one of many in the mass
media who play on fear and use questionable authorities and statistics to
back up allegations of plagues and epidemics of everything from road rage to
internet addiction. But like I said, let’s give credit where credit’s due.

The focus of the Oprah show was on an important intellectual trait of a
critical thinker: being skeptical and inquisitive regarding claims made by
government agents, the media, and corporations. The critical thinker’s worldview should include
awareness that many people are trying to manipulate our thoughts and actions.
It should also include awareness that all of us are prone to self-deception.
I doubt that Oprah thinks of herself as a manipulator, but that’s what she is
on many of her shows. Like all of us, she doesn’t like it when she’s been
manipulated, as she felt she was by James Frey who tried to pass off a work
of fiction as an autobiography. As I said, I don’t want to demean Oprah
because we’re all manipulators and we’re all self-deceived at times. We
should be thankful for at least one or two programs where she is obviously
hammering home the importance of getting the truth rather than some feel-good
story about angels or spirits or some weepy story that arouses the amygdala
without stimulating the frontal lobes.

Anyway,
some of the tips she gave for thinking critically about politics are worth
repeating. (I’ve reduced and modified the list for brevity’s sake. E.g. Get
active. Don’t get your reality from TV.) For example:

Get
multiple viewpoints. Read or listen to people on the right, the left,
and in the middle.

Find
a role model whom you trust and has a reputation for courage and honesty
and isn’t always toeing the party line.

Surround
yourself with people who like vigorous conversation rather than shouting
matches.

Don’t
be afraid to suspend judgment at times. You don’t always have to have an
opinion on every hot-button issue that comes down the pike. It’s okay to
say “I don’t know.”

Be
a skeptic but not a cynic. Don’t be afraid to doubt claims that are made
without support. Ask questions. But don’t stereotype politicians or
journalists. Don’t assume that they are all liars or intentionally
biased. Don’t be gullible. Make others provide reasons and evidence for
their claims. The skeptic says, “That doesn't sound right to me. Show me
the evidence.” The cynic says “you politicians and journalists are all
liars. I don’t trust anything you say.”

This advice is all well and good,
but how much impact did it have? How much impact could such a program
have? You can’t be a critical thinker for a day and then move on or back to
things as they used to be. If you don’t follow up in a relentless way, all
will be forgotten when the next pack of celebrities or politicians bursts
into the spotlight.

On a
follow-up program, Oprah read some email she’d received regarding the show on
Truth in America. Some thanked her for encouraging people to question
authority and some criticized her for not standing behind the President. She
then showed a clip of Fox commentator Bill O’Reilly describing Oprah as
having gone over to the dark side with the far-left liberal secular progressives
for encouraging people to be critical of the Bush administration and for
promoting Frank Rich’s biased book. Oprah responded by inviting O’Reilly to
be a guest on her show. She said she was surprised he accepted. He said “I
may be an idiot but I’m not stupid.” He made it clear that he was there to
sell copies of his own biased book. In his book, and on the Oprah show,
O’Reilly claims that there are two kinds of people in America: those like him
who love and cherish the traditional values of America and the “secular
progressives.” There would be no discussion of critical thinking. It was back
to Oprah as usual, which, I think we all know, is
what her audience wants. Even so, I think we should be thankful for small
favors and at least when Oprah talked about critical thinking,
she was in fact talking about critical thinking, not the promotion of
her own spiritual or political worldview.

Overall, she
covered a few lessons from Kahane’s book, the ones
on manipulation of the mass media by politicians, corporations, celebrities,
and anybody else who might be in the news. She may have appeared to have
contradicted her own advice about thinkers and screamers when she invited
O’Reilly on the show, but the advice is still good advice. Can we really
blame her for not encouraging her viewers to devote their lives to examining their basic
assumptions and start questioning their own worldviews? How long would
her show last if she repeatedly warned her audience that they might be wrong
about almost everything they believe and exhorted them that until they’re
willing to subject their own basic beliefs and values to a thorough,
fair-minded evaluation, they’re not critical thinkers?

Still, I
would have liked to have seen her use the opportunity to encourage her viewers
to reflect on some fundamental issues in critical thinking. For example, she
might have brought up the issue of groupthink, the fact that decision makers often make bad decisions
when they surround themselves with people who are afraid to rock the boat by
bringing in information and ideas that might conflict with what they think
the boss wants or what they think the group closest to the boss wants.
Decision making has a moral dimension: the more important the decision and
the more people it affects, the more moral responsibility the ones making the
decision have to make sure they make the best decision possible under the
circumstances. The decision to go to war or not is monumental and requires
the highest of fair-minded and reflective thinking on the best evidence
available. Making a decision and sticking with it is not nearly as important
as making sure that the decision is justifiable, especially if the decision
impacts the lives of thousand of others. All views,
even those that contradict the consensus view, should be heard.

I would have
liked to have seen Oprah or Dr. Clark bring up the issue of evaluating
evidence, especially eyewitness testimony and photographic evidence. They
might have reviewed the dangers of accepting either at face value. Eyewitnesses
are not always reliable. Some of them might have ulterior motives in
reporting what they do. They might be mistaken in their interpretations of
events. Their intentions might be good, but their intelligence might be
faulty. Photos might be interpreted in multiple ways.

They might
have brought up wishful thinking and self-deception and how
those two psychological factors affect all of us and have to be constantly
guarded against, lest they lead us to disastrous decisions that have to be
rationalized again and again after our original justification has been shown
to be flimsy and unsubstantial.

At the end
of the day, however, we have to realize that Oprah’s job is entertainment,
not education. At least on this one show her heart was in the right place.
She was encouraging people to be independent thinkers. She was
encouraging them to not just follow the party line or accept what
politicians, the national press, or celebrities say. She encouraged her
audience to be fair-minded and get a variety of viewpoints on issues. She
advised them not to reject outright views that don’t jibe with their
own. There are, of course, other things of interest besides politics,
but these strategies would apply to many other fields. Those of us who teach
critical thinking should be grateful that at least for one day Oprah made our
jobs a little easier.

§

As I
mentioned above, I developed a definition of critical thinking based on
Robert Ennis’s definition. Mine goes like this: Critical thinking is
thinking that is clear, accurate, knowledgeable, reflective, and fair in
deciding what to believe or do.

The
definition and the strategies mentioned earlier can be applied in many
subject areas for developing curricula aimed at teaching critical thinking.
I’ve applied this model of teaching critical thinking to three kinds of
classes at the college level: in introductory philosophy courses where I use
Socratic dialogue as the main teaching tool, the general course in logic and
critical thinking, and a content-focused class that applies critical thinking
to scientific studies of the paranormal.

I didn’t
know it when I started my teaching career but I was teaching critical
thinking in my introduction to philosophy course and in my introduction to
logic course. I didn’t know it because the expression was not in vogue in
1974. It became a popular buzz word in California after November 1, 1980,
when Glen Dumke, the Chancellor of the California
State University and Colleges (as they were then called), issued an executive
order regarding General Education-Breadth graduation requirements for the CSU
system. It ordered that graduates “will have achieved the ability to think
clearly and logically [and] to critically examine information….” Dumke made it clear that he meant a lot more by the expression
“critical thinking” than just “being critical” or identifying common
fallacies in reasoning. Dumke wrote:

Instruction
in critical thinking is to be designed to achieve an understanding of the
relationship of language to logic, which should lead to the ability to
analyze, criticize, and advocate ideas, to reason inductively and
deductively, and to reach factual or judgmental conclusions based on sound
inferences drawn from unambiguous statements of knowledge or belief. The
minimal competence to be expected at the successful conclusion of instruction
in critical thinking should be the ability to distinguish fact from judgment,
belief from knowledge, and skills in elementary inductive and deductive
processes, including an understanding of the formal and informal fallacies of
language and thought.

Similar requirements quickly
followed for the California Community Colleges. Philosophy departments were
ecstatic. This looked like a Full-Employment for Philosophers Act, since the
requirements it laid out are the core topics in logic and other philosophy
courses. Community college philosophy departments would benefit because many
of our students transfer to the state universities. Our introduction to
philosophy course and our introduction to logic course were both immediately
accepted by the CSU campuses as satisfying the new critical thinking
requirement.

Even though
our intro to logic course fit the definition of critical thinking that the
CSU Chancellor had presented, that definition would not hold the center.
Faculty in many departments began meeting and reflecting on “critical
thinking” and its relation to their courses. Sonoma State University, in
addition to sponsoring several international conferences on critical thinking,
set up The Center for Critical Thinking. A movement had begun, textbooks were
rewritten and several new texts came out that identified themselves as
critical thinking texts. New courses were designed and old courses were
redesigned. It was either adapt or die for our intro to logic course. It
gradually became a critical thinking course and is now called Logic and
Critical Reasoning instead of Introduction to Logic.

Basic
introductory courses in philosophy allow me to explore with my students some
interesting topics in areas like metaphysics, epistemology, ethics,
philosophy of religion, and philosophy of science. Since I consider Socrates
to be a model critical thinker, it is natural for me to use the Socratic
method when exploring issues like free will and determinism or the existence
of God. Students quickly learn that I’m not interested in what they
think or what their opinion is on anything. Anybody can think and have
an opinion, but what matters to me as a teacher of critical thinking is what
reasons you have for thinking what you do and can those reasons stand
up to scrutiny? If a student tells me that she really likes the argument
from design, I’ll ask her why. And when she tells me that it just makes
sense to her or that she can’t believe that everything just happened
randomly and that there’s no rhyme or reason to anything and our lives are
meaningless, she is not going to be allowed to sit down with a smile on
her face to the accepting nods of the other students, all of them content
with their belief having been eloquently stated by their comrade. It’s my job
to ask her questions that might prod her into thinking critically about the
problem before us: we’ve got this universe and it seems to be governed by
what we call laws of nature and we’re wondering how it got here, how it got
to be the way it is, and what our place in the scheme of things might be. One
possibility is that it was designed by some sort of powerful creator for some
reason known perhaps only to the creator-being. The student thinks that the
alternative to this possibility is that the universe came into being randomly
and has no purpose and neither does her life or that of anyone else. It’s my
job to ask her questions that attempt to get her to realize that the
alternative isn’t a totally “random” universe (there are laws of nature,
after all) and that living a meaningful life is not necessarily connected to
whether the universe as a whole has any purpose. I must ask her questions to
try to get her to clarify her concept of this designer. I’m not there to
affirm her worldview nor am I there to bust it up. I’m there to try to get
her to examine it and clarify it and understand it better so that she has a
more rational understanding of what it is she’s saying. Ultimately, I want her
to be able to rationally defend whatever philosophical position she takes. As
a human being, I care what beliefs my students have. But as a critical
thinking teacher, I don’t care what their positions are. What I care about is
how they defend them.

Socrates
made people clarify their claims and he asked questions that didn’t just
reveal flaws in those claims, such as contradictions or questionable
implications. He also raised the question as to what else is possible. He
might get Euthyphro to say that piety is doing what
pleases the gods and then get him to see that it’s possible piety means
something else altogether. Socrates represents the critical thinking
disposition: he’s open-minded, inquisitive, and skeptical. This
disposition is essential to the ability to see and consider alternatives, one
of the fundamental skills of a critical thinker.

Socrates is
also a model for how critical thinkers are sometimes poorly received by the
general public and those in power. People who question authority, who aren’t
afraid to say what’s on their minds even if it’s unpopular, who challenge
traditional beliefs and customs, who rock the boat and don’t go along with
the crowd, are not usually popular figures. I think critical thinking
teachers should try to get students to understand the value to society of
people like Socrates, as well as the benefit that comes to the individual
from being an independent thinker.

In addition
to Socratic modeling, another useful technique for stimulating critical
thinking is to pose outrageous scenarios for the students to reflect on. For
example, after discussing various arguments regarding free will and
determinism, I’ll ask the students to consider the following: if you had the
power to implant every person in society with a chip that would make it
impossible for them to do evil, would you do it? You can define evil any way
you want. Would you do it? Consider the consequences of your action and the
assumptions you are making. What would society be like? What would human
beings in your society be like? Would you do it? Remember, I tell them, we’re
always talking about getting rid of evil, of stopping crime, of ending rape,
child molestations, and war. You can do it with the flip of a chip. Would you
do it? Defend your answer. As a critical thinking teacher, I don’t really
care what answers they give or how eloquently they express themselves. I care
about the reasons they give for their answers. Can they justify
whatever positions they take? (This exercise also serves to prepare them for
the so-called ‘problem of evil’ when we get to arguments for and against
believing in God.)

The general
philosophy class is fun and it allows me to challenge students to think about
their thinking, to analyze, evaluate, and advocate arguments. The Socratic method
of demanding clarification and encouraging cross-examination can be used at
many levels and in many different kinds of courses. Even so, I prefer
teaching the Logic and Critical Reasoning course. If I had my way, students
wouldn’t be allowed to take introduction to philosophy or ethics or many
other lower division classes until after they’d passed the logic and
critical thinking course. In the general critical thinking course, students
are taught the basics of argument evaluation. If they knew those basics, most
of them would do a lot better in their philosophy courses. These basics can
be taught in many content area classes, but they take time and the more time
spent on such matters, the less time there is for covering the content of the
course.

In the
general critical thinking course, in addition to teaching various critical
thinking skills and emphasizing the importance of the attitude or disposition
of the critical thinker, I get to spend a good deal of time reviewing some of
the major obstacles to critical thinking and some of the things that limit
our ability to be successful at fair-minded, reflective thinking about
beliefs and actions. Many of these topics could be and are covered in
psychology and other classes. I’ve written about many of these affective,
cognitive, and perceptual biases and illusions on my website, The Skeptic’s
Dictionary. A list of them may be found in the entry on hidden persuaders (http://skepdic.com/hiddenpersuaders.html).

It’s
important that students understand why they can’t take experience at face
value and why they should be open to alternative explanations for their own
and other people’s experiences. I’m able to bring this point home most
effectively in my critical thinking about the paranormal course. In
that course, we explore the nature of anecdotal evidence and why scientists
have tried to study the paranormal under controlled conditions that are
repeatable. We study the history of psi research (a short version of which I
have published online at http://skepdic.com/essays/psihistory.html)
to discover errors and attempts at correcting those errors in research
methods that have occurred over the past century and a half. We also examine
what are considered the best scientific evidence for the paranormal: the
ganzfeld telepathy studies and the PEAR micro-PK studies. We also examine the
best of the healing prayer studies and Gary Schwartz’s so-called afterlife
experiments. (For a complete list of what we study, see the syllabus for
the course, which is posted online at http://skepdic.com/essays/phil322.html.)

In both the
general critical thinking course and in the paranormal course the students
learn the limitations of anecdotal evidence and the importance of controlled
studies. In the paranormal course, I spend an entire class period
listening to anecdotes of the paranormal from students. To encourage them to
be open-minded, in addition to having them read a number of entries from The
Skeptic’s Dictionary, I have them read Gary Schwartz’s The Afterlife
Experiments and Dean Radin’sThe Conscious
Universe, which has a chapter with a number of vivid, detailed stories of
paranormal experiences.

We review
several anecdotes from Radin’s text and from the
students, who always have a few beauties of their own to share. I also share
some of the stories people have shared with me over the years in response to
my Skeptic’s Dictionary website. We examine seemingly paranormal events and
explore various alternative explanations. Yes, the event might be paranormal,
but it might be coincidence. Or there might be some physical or
psychological explanation for the event. Or there might be a hoax
or fraud involved. For example, one student told the following story
and we then discussed it in class. She and some friends were out for a drive
in a car and they came to a stop behind another car. The group had been
discussing the paranormal and one of them suggested they try to make the
trunk on the car in front of them open up by using their minds to concentrate
on making it happen. When the car in front of them started to move, to their
surprise its trunk opened. One possibility is that they demonstrated
psychokinetic powers. Another is that it was a coincidence, albeit a very
unlikely one, that the trunk opened right after they had tried to open it
with their mental intention. Another is that one of them consciously or
unconsciously perceived that the trunk was open, which led her to consciously
suggest that the group try it. It would be farfetched, but it’s possible that
it was a hoax that involved either a conspiracy between one of the girls in
the back car and somebody in the front car, or some sort of remote trunk
opener operated by one of the girls in the car. It’s also possible that the
student telling the story made the whole thing up. After the students and I
had discussed the various possibilities, I asked the one who told the story
if she and her friends had tried it again on another car. If a second trunk
had popped open when they concentrated on it, the coincidence probability
diminishes to near zero and the hoax explanation gets much more complicated
and less feasible. The psychological explanation in terms of unconscious
perception gets pretty remote if the experiment is repeated soon after the
initial test but on a different car. Had they tried it again and again,
always with success, then the paranormal explanation would seem to move to
the top of the list as the most plausible. Unfortunately, they didn’t try it
again. But a discussion of why they should have then led to a discussion of
controlled experiments, why we do them, and how we might set one up to
test psychokinetic powers.

One of my
favorite activities in the paranormal course is pretending to be a scientist
for a day. I wear a white lab coat, put signs on the classroom doors that say
ESP EXPERIMENT GOING ON – PLEASE KEEP YOUR THOUGHTS TO YOURSELF, dim the
lights, and recreate a pathetic version of the J. B. Rhine ESP card
experiments.

Zener cards
are easy to make. One deck consists of 25 cards, 5 of each

of the following:

Here is a
general description of the experiment:

The tests involve a sender and a
receiver. The sender concentrates on the selected card while the receiver
concentrates on trying to get information from the sender’s mind (telepathy)
or from the card itself (clairvoyance).

Things I
ask the students to consider about setting up this experiment:

problems:
no way to distinguish clairvoyance from telepathy by this test; sensory
leakage and cheating could also account for significant deviation from
chance

documentation

Calculating
chance odds:

With a deck of 25 cards, going
through the deck with replacement (i.e., once a card has been selected it is
returned to the deck), getting 5 correct (20%) would be about what we’d expect
by chance. (We can’t be exactly sure what would be expected by chance
because pure chance is calculated by assuming an infinite number of
tries.)

We predict
that a group of people taking such a test would score at about chance level.
For a run of 100 trials, we expect individual scores to range between 12 and
28. (Here I bring in a colleague from the statistics department to explain
why this is so.)

Our
procedure:

We run two trials of 25 tries each,
using a computer to generate the order of the cards the sender will
concentrate on. I created 50 cards (out of ordinary 3 x 5 index cards and a
black marker) to match the computer selections. We then ran two trials of 25
each with a Zener deck without replacement and without feedback (we just went
right through the deck after shuffling them and did not tell the participants
what cards were selected until the test was completed).

In one
study, the results were: Overall, we had 22 participants who got a cumulative
431 correct out of 2,200 chances (19.6%). They got 15 more correct (3.5%) in
the last 2 sets of trial (no computer).

The highest score was by a
co-conspirator (an ethics teacher) who cheated her way to 56% correct. The
highest score by a non-cheater was 25. The lowest was 14.

The cheater
was signaled for three of the kinds of cards. Her score was 68% correct on
three of the four trials. She could not see my signals in the third trial and
only got 5 of 25 correct in that trial.

In our discussion session, we
considered:

How
might we explain the ethics teacher getting 56% when 20% was chance
expectation?

How
might we explain that one student got only 14% right and another got 25%
right, if 20% is chance expectation?

What
conclusion should we draw from our data?

How
might we improve the design of the test?

§

Some might
ask why we bother to teach critical thinking and why we care so much about
encouraging rationality. Some might wonder why teachers of critical thinking
sometimes act as if the future of civilization depended on rationality. Well,
guess what? It does. As somebody—I think it was Stephen J. Gould—once said
when asked if he realized that the forces of irrationality were winning: maybe
so, but imagine what it would be like if we did nothing.